I never understood this whole damn Gnome/KDE war. To the extent I appreciate reasons development teams may have, funding in particular.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out flame wars between KDE and Gnome users, though.

These two desktops together are arguably the most important enabler for wider Linux acceptance. It's such a cool thing being able to switch between them whenever one wants to. Especially these days, when most of the gtk/qt apps work well in both environments.

I love both and switch between them on regular bases. Both look nice, speed is comparable and I'm never bored with the same look&feel for ages.

GNOME can now show that an application is starting, so you don't feel the need to click a second time. For instance, if the application supports it, the cursor may change to a clock while the application starts if the application supports startup notification. Unlike some past attempts at UNIX startup notification, the new standard is reliable and robust, in keeping with the GNOME philosophy of things that "just work."

Does anyone know whether the KDE equivalent is a past attempt they are talking about?

No they are talking about xalf which had many problems. Startup notification is a freedesktop.org spec so KDE and Gnome apps should be using this, at least in the future. (I'm not sure how much KDE has jumped onboard freedesktop.org standards).

Does anyone know whether the KDE equivalent is a past attempt they are talking about?

Yes. The KDE system was a good first attempt, but suffered from not having toolkit/desktop integration as well as it could have. If an app didn't support it, or crashed on startup, the throbber would hang indefinately. This system has toolkit/X integration, and is only activated for programs that flag themselves as supporting it, so it's more robust and useful.

Are you lying? Have you last used KDE in 1997?
You are wrong.
The (configurable) throbber will quit no matter what happens after 30 seconds.

Not really, I'm just inaccurate. I realised about a minute after I posted it that my wording was sloppy there.

I have yet to find an application that does not "SUPPORT" KDE startup notification.

That's because it gave you startup notification regardless of whether the app "supported" it or not. Hence for many apps, the throbber would hang there until it was killed by a timeout (yes, 30 seconds, i remember now).

Support in this sense means that the app signals the startup notifier when it's done loading (the notification is also cancelled when the first window opens, but that's unreliable iirc). You add the line StartupNotify=true to the.desktop file to signal support.

Are you telling me that the GNOME startup notification will work only with GNOME apps and that it is more "robust and useful" because of this? I can't believe it.

No. Again, sloppy wording, the startup notification is a freedesktop.org spec that both KDE and GNOME are using (or will be using), as well as 3rd parties. That means that eventually hopefully all apps will support it. In fact, any app linked with GTK2.2 gets supports for it semi-automatically I think.

Bit of trivia: so far there have been > 250k hits in the screenshots dir!

Talking about the start notification... In the new kde I've noticed on a dual head display (not xinerama) loading konqueror on the second head causes it to actually show on the first head, leaving the throbber on the second head throbbing for the secs.

YOU CAN NOW HAVE TRANSPARENT PANELS!
I was under the impression that X didn't support transparency (Since it predates the invention of glass) and so the only way you could get it was an ugly hack involving taking a shot of the root window and bluring, which created some really strange effects if you stacked windows up. How have they got around this?

They "got around" this by taking a shot of the root window and bluring. But I don't know what "strange effects" you're talking about. In general, the technique works well, but deffinately falls under the "hack" category. The *real* solution would be to use XRender, but well, that's a-whole-nother ball of wax that I don't want to get into.

They would, indeed, rock - if they were indeed transparent. I thought it was a bit sad that "they" cheated by just grabbing a section of the main window and shading it; i.e., it only looks transparent if you never hide the panel.

Is there a way to remove the Trash and Home icons from the desktop yet? I've been able to do this in XP and KDE3 since they came out. If I can't have a totally clear desktop, I'll pass on this release.

Nautilus draws the desktop normally, and it seems as thugh they have removed the UI element to configure whether you can put icons on the desktop, however by digging through the gconf scehema, you can stop nautilus from drawing the desktop by running:

Is there a way to remove the Trash and Home icons from the desktop yet? I've been able to do this in XP and KDE3 since they came out. If I can't have a totally clear desktop, I'll pass on this release.

I just type 'X' (from the text-mode console) and admire the ultra-clean desktop.

On rare occasions when I need something done I type 'export DISPLAY=:0 ; sleep 10 ; xterm' from another console before that.

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source
of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into
writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in
a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may
find some interesting information within this text that you like to
read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes,
otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a
different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome [gnome.org] community. the things that are
going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and
thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it
since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly
written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly
into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released
version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of
targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so
called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people
that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually
business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting
gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under
contract by companies like redhat [redhat.com],
ximian [ximian.com] and sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much
as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy
clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so
far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf [gnome.org], an evil windows
registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal
of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and
applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the
core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only
a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now
this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated [osnews.com]
because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't
want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people
increased. more [gnome.org],
more [gnome.org]
and more [gnome.org]
emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain
their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what
their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up
with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users
should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are
being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the
user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't
really satisfying for the user. even constructive
feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden
that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development
team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more
important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that
this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about
gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication
isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our
users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you
afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on
programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the
reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what
matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake
up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core
developer martin baulig [gnome.org] out of team. a guy who worked
really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly
person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites
such as havoc pennington [pair.com] were responsible that he left the
gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to
much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened
such as button reordering [gnome.org]. needless to say that this
confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages.
even our fellow linux guru alan cox [gnome.org] wasn't thrilled about
this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth
nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following
the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something
that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems
to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they
changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users
became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and
the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply
copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use
a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep
in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead
into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome
human
interface guides [gnome.org] were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface
guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability
people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about
it the first
time [kde.org] when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened
after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off
about this attitude. you can read more on this link [kde.org]. to
summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their
own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every
little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over
night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a
disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their
life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an
example look what happened to galeon's interface [sourceforge.net]
(pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year
galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and
wrote this
email [sourceforge.net] to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that
the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of
heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences
like the quoted ones.

"the user don't know what a window manager is"

"the user don't know what themes are"

"the user don't know what a homedir is"

"the user can't compile a kernel"

"the user don't want to customize their desktop"

"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines
because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases.
to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link [gnome.org] and grep in their
archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc
pennington.

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be
fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc
pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various
users [gnome.org] told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well
aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's
a reason why people are switching from alternative operating
systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the
system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus [eazel.com]. the current maintainers got
the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented
user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact
words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by
clicking on this
link [gnome.org].

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with
his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or
because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be
that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a
cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your
cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of
all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it
you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files
are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your
homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that
know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the
users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all
the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts
together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the
creators of the common desktop
environment [opengroup.org]. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even
havoc pennington author of the good user
interfaces [pair.com] text isn't able to get his own written software following
his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus'
where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported
alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report
can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here
have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of
another crow out'. now you can click on this
link [gnomedesktop.org] and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from
various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and
nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's
there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on
this link [gnomedesktop.org].

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome
community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to
go for
this [coreyo.net] ugly fileselector instead going for this one [wanadoo.nl] which was developed by a
free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and
clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but
it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps.
you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which
basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented
preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the
possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with
that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in
a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you
delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees
and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a
discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a
registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years
but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most
retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy
is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash
by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't
know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor
people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies
such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you
could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork
gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the
code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source
the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it.
even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code -
go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any
direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and
let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things
are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party
projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components
into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86
version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code
like, gnome-xml [xmlsoft.org], pkgconfig [freedesktop.org], fontconfig [fontconfig.org], xcursor and xft2 were
mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome
development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the
look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp
has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on
integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure
and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the
gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that
don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have
gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the
same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting
other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and
applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the
pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to
solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big
companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with
gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it
rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86
with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way
having your settings defined with.xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into/etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i
can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and
even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad
influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of
some gnome developers is another story since we are all different
reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts
otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even
amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that
hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right
now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out
that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the
contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are
reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around
1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation
of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so
much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to
think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of
gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that
the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they
plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not
happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

I'm just one of the many Gnome users who has been totally pissed off by Gnome 2. First I discover that gnome-terminal no longer works. You can't complete an X selection with a right click because this always brings up a silly menu. Which is a real problem when you are selecting pages of text. I go to bugzilla, note that this has already been reported, but that nothing is going to be done about it, because 'consistency' demands that right clicks bring up menus. I guess the latest version of gnome-terminal is so consistent that [Tab] moves between tabbed terminals, and bad luck if you want to use filename completion, consistency demands making the terminal unusable, so unusable it shall be! So I'm having to use rxvt again until (if ever) gnome developers start listening to their users and fix their terminal.

Next thing they only allow one window list, and it doesn't have the option of 'close all' for stacked windows... argh! Then I notice I cannot any longer put menus onto the panel, only useless (because I can't label them) drawers. So no I have to wait till the tool-tip shows till I know what particular action any launcher button will have, and they randomly change positions to boot.

OK, at one level the idea Gnome has is good, cut out the cruft, keep it simple and elegant. Great! What is missing, however, is the option for users to mess it up again, and especially for users who are used to using Gnome in a certain way, to make Gnome work for them again. The insanity of the Gnome project is this: Ignore, no discourge, you existing users, and design your system for a set of users who don't now, and are unlikely ever to, use your system (ie the corporate desktop). There is an underlying assumption at work here, "if we make our system easy enough to use, easier than windows, then the corporate desktopers will come flocking to us." That is like saying "if our web site has content as good or better than msn.com, we will start to get more hits than them;" or "if we make a better VCR standard, people will stop using VHS..."

Simplicity, in the current Gnome way of thinking, means treat the user as an imbicile, and take away the users options. Eg, the user is never to be allowed to hear the words "window manager," much less be given a way (within the GUI system) to change them! This is a foolish approach. The newcomers to Gnome/Linux are not likely to be the corporate desktop users (though perhaps in eductional/academic and in the not-for-profit sectors some chance of adoption does exist), they are going to be skilled windows users, who want to learn about Linux, and who want more options to configure their desktops than windows gave them, not less!

And what happens when users, real actual Gnome users, complain about the direction Gnome is taking. They get told that this feature they have been using is not something a "regular" user would want, or worse they get told, "I don't care if you don't use Gnome." Gnome guys, wake up, those are the 'regular' users.

Despite my rant, I'm still resisting changing over to KDE, I guess I hope that some people will start listening and fix up the problems. But if all that is happening is that Gnome is working on features like transparent panels, while leaving the gnome-terminal in its present broken state, I'm a fool to hope, and to hold out.

and guess what, all the choices eventually growto be configurable so that they act like any ofthe other choices, or indeed like any hisotricalOS ever. So useful. What a good way tospend our time, writing multiple "design your own UI" construction kits.

Maybe it's time for something different.If people want to work on developing it,who are you to tell them how to spend their time?

You are free to work on developing your own"advanced user environment E" if you don't haveenough options in that area yet. Or free to create add-ons or partial replacement apps for anyexisting environment. Isn't open source great?

If you want to understand GNOME direction though,I'd suggest some good books, such as"User Interface Design for Programmers,""The Inmates are Running the Asylum,""Designing from Both Sides of the Screen,"etc.

Technical users are so quick to assume that all software should be written for them, and that despite having zero expertise in interaction design they know exactly how a GUI should be (it should be exactly like the GUI I got used to in 1992, darnit! must... not... learn... new... things...)

The historical situation of 1001 choices, as long as they are all confusing and hard to use, is a good way to keep free softwarelimited to 0.5% of the users in the world.It's hypocrisy to brag about choice whenall the choices are the same.

It's not like there's any danger that there won'tbe enough hyper-configurable advanced user features and environments available. Somehow,I have faith that we're safe there. So whynot let just *one* project try something differentwithout whining about it endlessly.

All that said, I don't even agree with the premisethat geeks only like the hyper configurable environments; OS X is prettypopular with the geek crowd these days.As is GNOME 2, for that matter.

In any case, I guess we'll see in a few yearshow it all turns out. My prediction is thatthere will be lots of environments and add-ons available,for different target audiences, and everyonewill be happy.

Excuse my ignorance, but I was under the impression
that in terms of Desktop Managers the choice at present is realistically
limited to Gnome or KDE. Moreover, my impression was that Gnome, by its
association with GNU, GTK etc, had pretentions of being the 'standard'
desktop in a GNU/Linux environment, not merely "something different."

If people want to work on developing it,
who are you to tell them how to spend their time?

Who am I? I'm nobody, I'm only a regular user who couldn't develop it themselves.
Yeah sure, I shouldn't tell someone how to spend their free time, but what
are you saying? That any adverse user feedback is unwelcome? Is the
policy of ignoring user feedback part of the official Gnome
developement guidelines, or is it just a bad habit that you have slipped
into lately?

You are free to work on developing your own
"advanced user environment E" if you don't have
enough options in that area yet. Or free to create
add-ons or partial replacement apps for any
existing environment. Isn't open source great?

Free sure, but maybe not technically skilled enough. Gimme a
break, I'm just one of your 'regular' gumbo users, you know the one
of the ones you are trying to protect from concepts such as 'Window Managers'
and all that stuff. We are your target audience, we don't create add-ons,
the only thing useful you'll get out of us is feedback! Besides which,
didn't you just tell me developing E, when ABC and D can already look
like E, was a waste of effort?

I'd suggest some good books...

If these books are truely telling you to design exclusively for
imaginary users, to tell real users what they need and what they don't
need and to ignore, insult or chase them away, I suggest you throw those
books away. Something you haven't learnt from those books is that you
are writing for a specific set of users, not some generic imaginary user.
Moreover the set of users of one type of app will differ from that using
a different app. The 'regular' user of a word processor will need to have different
needs to a 'regular' user of a terminal emulator. Sure, there is
also a need for consistency, which adds another level of difficulty.
But to resolve this difficulty by simply ignoring the needs of the user is not
the way to go.

"The Inmates are Running the Asylum,"

Ignore user feedback, give the users only what the developers imagine,
or have read, they want... Maybe you should read that book again.

Technical users are so quick to assume that all software should be written for
them,

Clearly not all software, but what about technical softwarer?
Surely terminal users have the right to the expectation that the terminal is
being written for them. Besides which, I'm not a 'technical' user, I'm a
'regular' user.

it should be exactly like the GUI I got used to in 1992, darnit! must...
not... learn... new... things...

Especially not new things like the term 'Window Manager':) Look the
mistake Gnome2 made was not in making users learn new things. It was taking
away features which users had grown accustomed to. Users expect 'more'
features when upgrading, not to have many feature they rely on removed. As
I said, cleaning out the cruft is nice, but not even giving the option to put
useful stuff back in... No wonder so many Gnome users are unhappy at the
moment.

It's not like there's any danger that there won't
be enough hyper-configurable advanced user features and environments
available.

I've not actually seen anyone asking for "hyper-configurable
advanced user features." What people seem to be asking
for is the newer version of Gnome to be able to do at least what
the older one could. For myself, being able to add menus to the panel,
and being able to complete text selection in a terminal with my right
mouse button is all I'm asking for. Look I'm sorry to sound completely
negative, as though there is nothing about Gnome2 that is good or better
than before. Tabbed terminal looks very cool, for example. But I can
live without tabbed terminals, I can't without X cut and paste. Sad fact
of human nature is that you are more likely to hear from people when they
are unhappy with you than when they are satisfied.

So why not let just *one* project try something different
without whining about it endlessly.

One project sure, just not Gnome:) And I haven't been
whining endlessly (though with the number of dissatisfied
users at the moment, it must seem endless). The previous
was my first post on this subject. I didn't post to Bugzilla
given that the same report had already be 'dealt with', I read,
but didn't post the the Gnome discussion groups, because I saw
how users were being dumped on by the developers. Maybe the endless
whining should tell you something?

Well, a new file dialog is planned for GTK2.4, and is developing in libegg CVS.

Note a few things:

1) GTK is a separate project from GNOME. That means, it's not simply something the gnome team have forgotten to get around to, it has to fit into the gtk feature cycle, it has to go through usability reviews, it has to be tested etc. New APIs will be needed probably. Then it has to be integrated with standardised mime typing and so on. There's a lot more work than you might think.

2) For GNOME2.2, gtk2.2 was released in time, great, fab. That probably won't be the case for gtk2.4, for reasons I won't go into, but basically the release schedules just don't mesh. However, GTK2.4 is backwards compatable with 2.2, so when it does come out, you just drop it in - all the apps get the new dialog.

The file selector does suck, but it takes more than a month for us to implement a good one. When it comes, it will rock, but since it should have a stable API for a long time we want to get this done right.
The file selector will be in Gtk 2.4, releasing in September. At this point you can drop the new Gtk library into place and all Gtk programs will have the new file selector.

All of the discussions I have seen about the differences between Gnome and KDE end up being flame wars. Is there anything I can read that gives a non-biased look at the differences and similarities between the two?

I have only tried Gnome once and that was only because KDE wasn't working at the time. I've used KDE since I started using Linux (and FreeBSD) and it has always worked pretty well for me. I've noticed however that Gnome seems to have a pretty good following and I'm wondering why.

> I concur (using a shell rather than a manager), though pretty/ugly are matters of preference. from what I've heard KDE's is 'better' functionally. This might be a perception holdover of when Nautilus was slow. I'm just passing along what I've heard.

I think for 90% of what normal users need or want, both Nautilus and Konqueror work fine.

They both are pretty much the same speed.Both have similiar feature sets as file management goes.Konqueror can thumbnail and has a few more file protocols by default than Nautilus does.Nautilus has some features than Konq doesn't (such as emblems)Konq has some features that Nautilus doesn't (split views, tabbed file browsing)Nautilus can browse webpages, but Konq is a real web browser (gnome has galeon to do this).

I concur (using a shell rather than a manager), though pretty/ugly are matters of preference. from what I've heard KDE's is 'better' functionally. This might be a perception holdover of when Nautilus was slow.

I still remember the first time I loaded up Nautilus at it's first major release and watched in amazement as CPU usage went through the roof, the drive thrashed and a window outline slowly filled in on the screen. Things improved quite a bit during the Gnome 1.x lifetime but moving to Gnome 2 and the new Nautilus is a day and night change. Nautilus on Gnome 2.x is fast, has some really sweet integration features which are only just being exploited now (fontilus springs immediately to mind) and there are bound to be more coming as people get to grips with it.

I still generally use the command line and a few perl scripts for most file manipulation. But just once or twice recently, I've been reaching for that Nautilus window to track stuff down, examine fonts and look for music.

In general, gnome2 is going for the "minimulistic, things just work" approach, while KDE is going the "ultra configurable, complete user control" approach.

I'm not up on KDE that much, other than playing with (and quite enjoying so far) 3.1 in the last while, but gnome has been hacking off options and reducing the ability for the user to mess thing up, or reduce the amount of clutter the user has to deal with to get things done, depending on who you talk to:) There have been no end of flame wars within gnome itself about this (see the desktop-devel and galeon-devel list archives for lovely examples of these).

Personally, well, like the other guy said, it really doesn't matter what I think, there are two different ways of getting things done, two different look and feels, and two different paths for you to try out and see if you like them:)

Is there anything I can read that gives a non-biased look at the differences and similarities between the two?

Whether to use KDE or Gnome depends very much on your personal taste. Every person needs different applications and uses other functions within these applications, so there simply cannot be a neutral perspective. Another problem for comparisions is that both projects have their own style that is liked by different people.

KDE, for example, tends to have more configurality, which is loved by a lot of people, but others think it is just code bloat and confusing to have so many options.

Some of the differences in style might have their reason in the fact that Gnome is backed by big companies like Sun. While companies aim for a desktop that doesn't confuse sysadmins with too many unneccessary options, hobby developers have more interest in adding new features and new options. But this is just my way of explaining differences, you will find all kinds of other opinions around as well.

I've noticed however that Gnome seems to have a pretty good following and I'm wondering why.

Well, I have an explanation for that, but being a KDE member, I will not give you my biased opinion on this.

BTW, I think the flame wars are mainly a problem of the past. Cooperations with KDE and Gnome are flourishing, KDE and Gnome already share a number of libraries, and most members of both projects seem to believe that choice is good. After all, KDE apps run under Gnome and vice versa, so you can decide on a per app basis which software to use.

I have only tried Gnome once and that was only because KDE wasn't working at the time. I've used KDE since I started using Linux (and FreeBSD) and it has always worked pretty well for me. I've noticed however that Gnome seems to have a pretty good following and I'm wondering why.

I've used Gnome since I started using Linux (no, wait - I used Windowmaker on the P90. I use Gnome since I have a faster computer than that). And it has always worked pretty well for me. I've noticed however that KDE seems to have a pretty good following.

And I'm not really wondering why. I just need a few things, Gnome does them, KDE probably does as well, it doesn't matter.

The only reason I use Gnome is for corner panels. I started out use KDE 1, and some friends were running Gnome with corner panels I I figured I'd give that a try. Despite the fact that gmc was a graphical front-end to sigsegv at the time, I never went back. Corner panels with auto-hide is like tabbed browsing in my opinion. Once you try, you don't go back.

I tried creating corner panels in KDE 2.2, but it just wasn't the same. It wasn't easy to setup and I never got farther than creating a single corner-type panel out of the main panel. KDE allows you to create more panels, but I couldn't figure out to make them act like the main panel (with auto-hide and what not).

I submitted a bug report to the KDE team about adding corner panels, but they terminated it and said to resize the panel. Maybe I'm missing something about panel creation. I'll try messing with 3.x once Debian gets it into unstable. Even so, I doubt I'd switch from Gnome. The apps I like all look nicer in Gnome (Gaim, Gnucash, etc) since they use the same toolkit at Gnome, but their integration isn't as tight.

Both desktops are great products but I just can't leave corner panels. I use apps from KDE every once in a while though.

KDE relies on Qt, which is owned by trolltech. However, it also relies on many things owned by the Free Software Foundation, such as libxml, glibc, etc, and things like XFree86 ("own3d" by the the XFree86 Project, Inc.)

mind you, QT is GPL'ed for GPL'ed apps to use. If Trolltech went down the drain or withdraw their licence you could always fork the latest GPL'ed QT and take over the development of it. From what I know Trolltech the KDE ppl work very closely when it comes to KDE. After all KDE is a proof and a very good showcase for Trolltech of what you can do with QT.

Your post is right in a lot of things, and a bit off in others. I want to elaborate on it a bit.

> From the user's perspective, the key difference is that GNOME tries to use good defaults instead of cluttering up the UI with rarely used options. These options are still available, but you have to use the registry-type GConf tool to enable it.

Yep, this is a basic design goal of GNOME 2.x. However, I'm not sure if a registry-type tool is the best way to fix this problem. This is a case in which I think *both* KDE and GNOME are off. Configuration should be handled by the application that needs it (except for system and desktop settings.) A "basic" config dialog should be shown first, and the user should be able to access "advanced settings" as well. In MacOS 7.0, for example, in the General Control Panel, you click on a triangle to show advanced settings. This is intuative for new users who occaisionally want to see "power user" settings.

> GNOME is a lot more willing to embrace and integrate crossplatform projects like OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Abiword. KDE is a lot more willing to recreate non-KDE projects and replace them with native KDE projects like KOffice and the Konqueror web browser.

KHTML (and khtmlw) were started at a time when Mozilla and Gecko were just a pipedream (re: very, extremely, pre-alpha state). KOffice (and abiword) were started before StarOffice opened up.

> KDE themes tend to be more bright and tend to use more neon colour.

Uhm, almost all KDE widget styles and window decorations allow the user to set the colors. This has been a basic tenent of all styles included in kdebase/kdeartwork since KDE 2.0.

> From the user's perspective, the key difference is that GNOME tries to use good defaults instead of cluttering up the UI with rarely used options. These options are still available, but you have to use the registry-type GConf tool to enable it. GNOME is a lot more willing to embrace and integrate crossplatform projects like OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Abiword. GNOME themes tend to be more subdued and tend to use more earth tones.

KDE, OTOH, tries to give the user all the options even if it causes clutter. KDE is a lot more willing to recreate non-KDE projects and replace them with native KDE projects like KOffice and the Konqueror web browser. KDE themes tend to be more bright and tend to use more neon colour.

> Other than that, there's not much difference. It's mostly a matter of taste. I definitely prefer GNOME, but I do like some KDE apps (e.g. Umbrello is great). Despite what the purists say, mixing desktops is not a sin.

Merge of sound systems. The might have to wait until there is a clear winner. esd isn't as good as arts. But arts has features that overlap but alsa is trying to achieve, and also overlaps with the forwarding-X-sound-server thing we heard about a few days ago. Getting that mess all cleared up will be _very_ nice.

Bridge between dcop and the gnome equiv. (Actually I'm not sure it has an equivalent. Bonobo is the equivalent to kpart I thing.. I get confused)

the one really cool feature from gnome 1.0 which was removed is still not here:

detachable menus, absolutely loved that in Galeon I could pull off a menu of bookmarks, when I was trying to hunt through a lot of them. Anyone know why it was removed, and/or when/if it's going to come back?

Tearoff menus have alwasy been in gnome2 (I think) but you have to use gconf-editor set enable.

The key is:/desktop/gnome/inferface/menus_have_tearoffs

Note that this will only effect gnome2 apps (I think). If your gnome1 apps have tearoff turned off you have to use the old gnome-cc to enable. Also, don't be afraid of gconf-editor, a good number of the so called "missing features" are still there!

Christ, man, thanks, you made my fucking day! I've gone months being royally pissed off cause I "lost" so many features in Gnome2. Well, I'm gonna have to fiddle with gcong and see what else is cool that i don't know about...;)

Does anybody know what's going on between Gnome and Enlightenment? It seems like Gnome is developing it's own window-manager-which-pretends-its-not-a-window-man ager (Metacity); meanwhile, Enlightenment is developing it's own desktop shell... kind of like two ships passing each other in the dark...

I'm going to hate the day when I'm forced to make a choice between Gnome and Enlightenment 0.17... I'll miss those footprints...

Do you not realize that that is pretty much the #1 complaint with GNOME? Why wasn't it included in GNOME 2.0, or even 2.2? Why rely on gtk 2.4 for this? GNOME is using, and has used in the past, many of it's own widgets in gnome-ui.

To be completely honest, I agree with the notion that the Gnome file selector is the best ever.

I was annoyed to death with KDE's and OOo's windows-alike clickfest.

I adore the keyboardability (great if you have a thousand files - just type the first few letters), the tab completion, and the split pane in the gnome file selector. (I think it's great that it separates files from folders - I have the files at a glance.)

It's true that many people complain about this so maybe it does have to be improved even further. But I really hope they don't accidentally disimprove it while they're at it.

GNOME also has (and has had for a long time), gnome-vfs. It still does not explain why a new file selector dialog was not included with either GTK 2.0 or GNOME 2.0, when they had the chance to rewrite everything.

How about this [debian.org] on Linux anyway, and I can't imagine it's any different on other Free OS's (now Windows might be more hassle). Is there any reason why an OS could not just use an automounter for ftp filesystems (when you access/ftp/user:pass@site it logs you in and mounts it)? Is there a reason why it needs to be at the level of the toolkit/window manager and therefore only partially available? Now please note that what I really mean is that we should implement these sorts of features lower down the chain, but if people higher up want to re-implement them because they think they can offer something else then that's ok to!

One of the things I've noticed about the default GNOME 2.x setup on my system (courtesy of Gentoo [gentoo.org]) is that it's very minimalist. Usually only one app per function and clean, simple menus with descriptive options. (In fairness, I do wish that a few more apps were included by default. Like an integrated mail handler and graphics editor.)

It occurred to me recently, when I tried KDE 3.1, that the way it seems so overdone has always turned me off from KDE. The KDE panel along the bottom is usually crowded with icons. The KDE menus are overflowing with application after application. Perhaps some of this is unneeded crap included by the packager, but I'm willing to be there are fewer menu items and redundant apps in a stock compile of a GNOME desktop than a KDE desktop.

Yes, I know I can clean up KDE until it's minimalist, but I shouldn't have to. I like starting with a clean sandbox and building my castle, thanks. I'd rather not have to tear someone else's castle down first.

Anyway, it has occurred to me that this cleanliness could be awfully appealing to a commercial company looking for a basic environment upon which to build a branded, heavily customized one. Instead of feeling like you have to rip the guts out to find a clean starting place or having to go app-by-app and menu-by-menu and replace or refine what's already there, you can start with a skeleton and build up from there.

Not that anyone's looking to do that, necessarily, but with Sun looking to use GNOME as their standard desktop, I'd like to know how easy it was to start from the baseline and build up.

> when I tried KDE 3.1, that the way it seems so overdone has always turned me off from KDE.

Uhm, it depends on how much of KDE you install. If you just emerge kdebase, for example, you get an extremely clean desktop (I count four icons on kicker from a freshly emerge'd KDE)

> Anyway, it has occurred to me that this cleanliness could be awfully appealing to a commercial company looking for a basic environment upon which to build a branded, heavily customized one.

Guess that isn't so, with companies like Coral (the first to do this), Lindows, Xandros, and Lycoris essentially doing this to KDE. SuSE, RH (with 8.0), also customize KDE, but not to the level that Corel/Lindows/Xandros/Lycoris do. Mandrake also does it to some degree.

Ximian also has done this in the past with GNOME. So has RH (depends on the version, a lot with 8.0) and Mandrake (to a lesser degree).

So, basically, either one is, and can be customized pretty easily and branded, as many people have done in the past.

I really have to congratulate the GNOME team. I'm one of those desktop skeptics who has formerly been sorely unimpressed by the state of GNOME and KDE, but both have been forging ahead. As I've become more involved with GNOME development, I've come to recognise the relationship between the two projects: they do compete but the beautiful thing is that they cover two separate niches. Namely, KDE forges ahead with the latest features (Xft, KHTML) and has a nippier release schedule, while GNOME tends to integrate more external technologies and tends to adopt features when they're more mature.

GNOME 2.2 has caught up not just visually, but also feature-wise with nifty features like the SSH and SMB backends, but has also been getting rid of visual artefacs leftover from the era of CDE and Motif -- sometimes, a flat look is more appropriate than 3D buttons, for example. I think the 2.2 release puts GNOME back in the game in a big way.

If you substitute "1.2" for "1.x" and "1.4" for "2.0" in your post, it makes sense. Gnome 1.2 was much faster than 1.4, though 1.4 was tolerable if you used gmc instead of nautilus. You can't really use gmc instead of nautilus with 2.0. However, nautilus is much speedier and stabler in 2.0, and is very usable. The only reason to wish for gmc again when you're using Gnome 2.0 is for gmc's much nicer context menus and archive handling.

Nautilus will, of course, be somewhat faster and more stable in 2.2, but compared to the leap in performance and stability from 1.4 to 2.0, this is definitely just incremental.

It seems to me that I just read that a new Ximian Gnome is going to be based on Gnome 2.2, but I don't recall where I saw that. Is there any truth to that? Is there a published timeline for such a release? The current Ximian Gnome was great when it came out, but it's starting to feel a little stale, especially after looking at Gnome 2.2 screenshots.

Don't want to have to compile a practically infinite number of packages from scratch by downloading each... and... every... one?

Don't want to trash your system by overwriting tons of libraries?

Don't trust your local package management system (or the packagers for that matter) to back out once you upgrade?

Check out Garnome [gnome.org]. It's easy to download [gnome.org] and install, and best of all, it installs under your home directory by default! They have a good walk-through on the main page. I've found this to be very nice, and a far smoother testing mechansim than anything else out there!

You just download a small BSD-style ports tree, and then kick off a compile (follow the README). It downloads, compiles and installs everything else!

I'm personally running the Sid version, which works great with a few minor quirks (Rep hangs on occasion and needs a good -HUP spanking), nothing horrible to deal with. There are also unnoffical Woody packages, if that's your bag.

I know what would be handy for me w.r.t. gnucash is a "MS Money User's Transition Guide" or some such. I've tried 1.4, 1.6, and the beta for 1.8, but I just cannot make a dent in doing much with gnucash. I invariably get frustrated and delete the whole thing. (Maybe I'm spoiled somewhat; I popped in MS Money on the windows box and was running multiple accounts, multiple banks, loans, credit cards -- the whole shebang -- in half an hour.) Can someone post anything notable that'd help user's of other finance programs to switch over?

Ok how abour a release of GnuCASH that someone other than the developers can compile? Oh wait let's download 90,000,000 libs.

Until they release a STATICALLY LINKED binary I shy away everyone from it... It's too damned hard to get compiled by a seasoned Linux vetran let alone the 15 Linux newbies in my LUG.

GnuCASH is early alpha software and will be reccomended by myself to everyone to be avoided until it is stable enough to compile on a standard distribution. Too many linux apps that have HUGE potential are crippled because of this. You want to use bleeding edge libs? Great! offer a static binary to download. It's not that hard.... Open office and mozilla do it.

Have you ever tried to compile GNOME on Solaris? Trust me, it's not just a./configure, make && make install. Last time I tried (~3 months ago) it took hours and hours of tedious dependency resolving and source hacking just to get it to compile cleanly, let alone work. Somethings just wouldn't compile, or would compile then seg fault when run. It's been a significant porting effort (and QA effort) that Sun has undertaken and congratulations to them for getting this far. I for one am hugely grateful.

Go read Gnome techical docs. Gnome apps communicate among them using Bonobo, which is a sort of DOM(if you are used to Microsoft stuff) build over CORBA, an industrial standard distributed object-oriented infrastructure (mostly used in Unixland, though you can get some of it also living in Windowsland). OAF IIRC is a sort of 'corba-specific domain name server' : it tells to the different 'clients' which 'server' has implemented the required 'object' and thush can provide the required 'service'.

AFAIK, this was the case also for gnome 1.4 and maybe in gnome 1.2. The funny-looking file names maybe were placed in a different place: try looking in your ~/.gnome* directories.

The main difference between 1.4 and 2.x is IMO the
user target: 1.4 was a nice tool to hack a very customised desktop on your PC. With 2.x, they try to reach the standard computer users, hiding away most of the options and implementing the hints of some 'usability studies' they have done with Sun
(of which the 'Action' menu is I think a result).